Friendly Fire by C. D. B.; Bryan Read Free Book Online Page B

intervention, Peg says with a sigh, “We don’t have a lot of friendship with the telephone company.” Still, they were the only persons in town willing to do anything about it.
    In 1967 Michael received a grant allowing him to go on from Rockhurst to the University of Missouri’s Agriculture School. When Michael returned to the farm for his first summer vacation, he brought Caroline Roby, a diminutive, pretty, happy auburn-haired girl with him. Caroline, four years Michael’s junior, was a student in one of the undergraduate biochemistry sections he taught. Michael was clearly in love with her. Caroline stayed a week, then went south to spend the rest of the summer with her divorced mother. Michael mooned about a bit, but he didn’t let his dejection interfere with his work. And during the evenings he would sit for hours with his mother and brother and sisters discussing the presidential campaign. All the family, with the exception of Gene, hoped Senator Eugene McCarthy would be the Democratic Party’s nominee. Gene Mullen thought McCarthy “lived in a cloud.” Still, like the Mullens, McCarthy was a Democrat, an Irish-Catholic, and, more important, his peace candidacy reflected the Mullens’ own growing concern over the war. That fall Michael would swallow his disappointment with McCarthy and vote for Humphrey over Nixon, pulling the straight Democratic Party lever in doing so. It was a party loyalty perhaps inherited from his grandmother.
    One morning, shortly before Michael was due to return for the University of Missouri’s summer session, he came in from the fields, sat down opposite his father at the round kitchen table and said, “Dad, you’re going to see the day when you won’t be able to afford to feed the grain we raise here to livestock!”
    â€œOh-h-h?” his father asked. “And why not?”
    â€œThose cereal grains will be needed to feed people.”
    Gene looked over his breakfast mug of coffee at his son with a chiding smile. “Well, Mikey, what are you going to do about that?”
    Without a moment’s hesitation Michael replied, “I’m going to learn how to take roughage—normal roughage—and make food from it that can be fed livestock and it’ll make them grow more meat to feed more people.”
    â€œI believe you will,” his father said.
    Michael was then working toward a combined MA-PhD degree in animal nutrition. His specific project was an experiment to develop a high-lysine corn which would eliminate the need to add supplementary proteins to livestock feed. If Michael said he would learn how to boost the protein content of corn from 8 percent to 12, his father believed there was no reason why he shouldn’t do it.
    â€œMike’s so much more intelligent than I,” Gene would tell his friends at John Deere. “If I try to give him a little static, he’ll just cut me off in one sentence. He’ll say, ‘Now here’s your argument, and here’s where’s it’s wrong.’ But,” Gene would be quick to add, “he won’t be trying to hurt me. He’s never talked back to me—he might not like what I say for him to do, but Mike’s never, ever talked back to me.”
    Michael never talked back, and he always did what he was told. That is why, when shortly after he returned to the University of Missouri that summer and received his draft notice ordering him to report in September for induction into the United States Army, he dutifully gave up graduate school and reported to the Des Moines draft headquarters.
    After his induction he was to have been placed on a military flight to Fort Polk, Louisiana, to begin infantry basic training, but no military flights left that day. To keep busy, Michael was given a job in the draft headquarters office filing case histories of young men who opposed the war, rejected the draft, who had found ways of having